The Huawei Watch 6 is a great-looking smartwatch with a superb screen, in-depth health tracking and solid multi-day battery life. Limited app support keeps it from competing with the smartest wearables, however, and inconsistent sleep tracking undermines some of its fitness credentials.

• Big, bright 1.5-inch screen
• Works with iOS and Android

• Very limited third-party app integration
• Inconsistent sleep tracking
• GPS can struggle a bit in built-up areas

• 

• Advanced health tracking Huawei’s X-Tap system combines ECG, PPG and pressure-sensitive sensors.

• Bright 1.5-inch display The large AMOLED screen is sharp, vibrant and bright enough for outdoor use.

• Multi-day battery life The Watch 6 can last around three and a half days with the always-on display and health tracking enabled.

The Huawei Watch 6 is a premium smartwatch that puts health and fitness tracking front and centre, combining a wide range of sensors with a stylish design, a bright display and multi-day battery life.

It’s not quite as smart as the best smartwatches running Wear OS or watchOS, largely due to its limited third-party app support, but Huawei is hoping that features such as X-Tap, Health Glance and improved activity tracking will make up for it. 

After spending a couple of weeks with the Watch 6 on my wrist, I’ve found plenty to like, though a few frustrating inconsistencies keep it from being the complete package.

• Familiar, yet still premium, design
• Bright, detailed 1.5-inch screen
• Case can be scratch-prone

The Huawei Watch 6 might not look all that different from the Watch 5, but that’s fine; the Watch 5 was already one of the more refined-looking smartwatches on the market, and the 6 continues that trend. The classic circular watchface is flanked by a rotating digital crown on the top-right, a button on the bottom right, and the return of Huawei’s X-Tap sensor system in the middle – but more on that a little later.

The overall look is, frankly, really nice; it doesn’t look or feel particularly techy on the wrist, with enough weight that it feels solid without being overly heavy, weighing in at around 60g. And, at 10.9mm thick, it’s far from the thickest wearable I’ve had on my wrist this year. 

It has nicely contoured edges, and small complaints from other smartwatches – like the odd gap they sometimes have between the strap and your wrist – are non-existent here. Huawei knows how to make a good-looking wearable, that’s for sure. 

And that’s paired with a handy strap system that takes a little bit of inspiration from Apple and Google, with a simplified design that lets you put on and take off the watch with one hand – again, something that sounds small but makes all the difference on the wrist. 

The band itself is soft and comfortable, made from fluoroelastomer, and can more than pass for both work and gym, though you can opt for various other straps, both from Huawei and third parties, considering it supports 22mm bands. 

Materials-wise, we’re looking at a nice high-end titanium finish for the 46mm model with reflective sides and a matte front that surrounds the sapphire glass-protected screen  – though the smaller 43mm model opts for a cheaper aluminium alloy instead, and I’m not quite sure why. 

But despite the tough material on the 46mm variant I’ve got on my wrist, I’ve found it still scratches quite easily; over the past 10 days of wear, I’ve somehow got a noticeable scratch on the matte-finish frame just above the screen and I don’t remember any particularly violent knocks or scrapes. 

The screen is another standout of the Watch 6; at 1.5 inches, it measures in the same as its predecessor, but this smooth LTPO-enabled screen now runs at up to 3500nits. 

With such high levels of brightness, it should come as no surprise that it was easily legible on bright, sunny days, and it meant that the built-in torch functionality (which uses the screen) works even better here than before – though it’s still not quite as handy as the built-in torch you’ll find on wearables like the Garmin Fenix 8.

Still, it’s bright, vivid and detailed, and the selection of pre-installed watchfaces looks absolutely fantastic. Even the bezel doesn’t look as egregious as it does on other wearables, with Huawei instead making it a core part of the design with classic watch etchings.

Durability-wise, there isn’t much of an improvement here – but with full IP69 and 5ATM that allows for use down to 50m, there isn’t really much else it do to improve. 

Features and software

• Runs HarmonyOS with basic smartwatch functionality
• Lack of third-party watch apps
• Works on iOS and Android, with dual connectivity

The Huawei Watch 6 sports Huawei’s home-grown HarmonyOS software that, in many ways, is pretty familiar. 

It works just like most smartwatches, with a swipe up to access phone notifications, swipe left or right to access widgets, and a swipe down from the top to access quick settings. A press of the digital crown will take you to the app menu – though this is arguably the area where Huawei falls down compared to smarter options like the Pixel Watch 5 and Apple Watch Series 12. 

Using its own custom OS means that third-party app support is pretty much non-existent. Apps like Spotify, Google Maps and MyFitnessPal aren’t available; instead, it’s mainly Huawei-designed health and fitness apps along with a few niche options like Trainpal, Emirates and MyBotPal. You can at least use the Watch 6 for payments in the UK now, with Curve Pay integration. 

There is support for some smartwatch functions – you’ll get notifications, though you can’t quickly respond to them, and you can take and make calls on the wearable, even if your phone isn’t connected, if you opt for the eSIM variant.

It’ll also display elements like the weather, calendar events and more, so it’s far from a basic experience, just not quite as capable as some others out there. And, even though Google Maps isn’t present, Huawei’s Petal Maps alternative is there for casual walking and cycling navigation. 

The upside to not using a platform like Wear OS – not that the US-blocked Huawei would be able to anyway – is that the Watch 6 is fully compatible with iOS and Android; not only that, but the watch can connect to two devices simultaneously. When you’d use that, I’m not sure, but you at least. 

Huawei also does some fun stuff with gesture controls, with a pinch of two fingers to select, a swipe on your finger to scroll and a flick of the watch to go back. It does take some getting used to, and I’d like the watch to be more responsive (I had to repeat the gesture every now and again), but it’s a genuine way to use the smartwatch when your hands are full. 

Health and fitness tracking

• Hit-and-miss sleep tracking

Really, the smartwatch features are secondary to the health and fitness features that the Watch 6 offers, so let’s delve into that a little more.

The Watch 6 is packed with health sensors, but the headline feature is Huawei’s updated X-Tap system, which combines ECG, PPG and a pressure-sensitive touch sensor in a compact module on the side. 

It works alongside the optical heart-rate sensor and the watch’s temperature, motion and atmospheric sensors to track everything from heart rate and SpO2 to arterial stiffness and pulse wave arrhythmia. Huawei’s Health Glance feature pulls a few of these checks together, even asking you to cough into the microphone for a respiratory assessment, before delivering a detailed report in just 60 seconds. 

It’s quick, unobtrusive and genuinely useful, especially if you don’t want to run every test individually. 

The Watch 6 also sports dual-band GPS to help track outdoor activities, so to put it to the test, I went on a 45-minute walk in my local park. It’s not quite as built-up as an urban jungle, living on the outskirts of London, but there are plenty of trees to obscure the wearable. Even then, there were only minor wobbles along the track that I couldn’t account for. 

Things got a little messier when I tried a similar 20-minute walk in the ultra-built-up Canary Wharf, though that is a demanding environment for any GPS device. That said, there are better watches for this kind of thing – the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 stands out in my mind as a recent option. That thing just to you. 

I appreciate the sheer amount of exercise-specific data and metrics that Huawei tracks, with elements like balance and intensity on runs and virtual power and ascent when cycling, with so many different watch layouts to choose from and customise so you can focus on the exact metric you’d like. It’s quite impressive stuff if you’re really into your sports and wellness.  

Now there’s way more to the Watch 6 than tracking runs and walks – there are over 100 forms of exercise available, with new additions for this year including indoor skiing, along with improvements to cycling metrics, and support for over 3000 global ski results to help you navigate the slopes without a phone when outdoor skiing. 

Of course, it’s not all about tracking your runs and cycles; the Watch 6 will also monitor your general health and wellbeing. There’s nothing new here that we haven’t seen before – it tracks elements like movement, HR, HRV, blood oxygen, movement and more, with a familiar set of rings tracking daily calorie burn, exercise time and standing time.

What is new for this year is a readiness score, which, as we’ve already seen on a plethora of devices, combines elements like recovery, sleep quality, skin temperature and cycle tracking to provide insight into how much you should push yourself on any given day. Again, not new tech, but new to Huawei, and a welcome addition that usually aligned with how energetic I felt. 

When it comes to tracking my sleep, however, I found it fell short compared to the likes of the Oura Ring 5. Now, while elements like sleep stage tracking will naturally vary among wearables, I found that the Huawei Watch 6 didn’t really notice when I was going to sleep. 

One night, it took me around an hour to fall asleep – Oura marked that awake time in bed correctly, but Huawei completely ignored it, only starting the tracking once I actually fell asleep, and that doesn’t give the most accurate overall snapshot. It’s the same with waking up during the night; nights where I got up and went to the loo went completely unnoticed by the Watch 6, but not my Oura Ring 5. 

Granted, I’m not the best sleeper, and most manufacturers admit that tracking is spottier with more troublesome sleepers like myself, but I’ve already experienced better, so I it’s possible. 

And it’s a bit of a shame, really, because Huawei does offer a depth of sleep-based data for you to scroll through each morning – but with my core sleep tracking being so off, I didn’t know how much I could trust what I was getting.

All this information is available both on the watch itself and the accompanying Huawei Health app. The companion app was never my favourite for navigation – it felt a little messy – though things have gotten better with a redesigned interface. It’s still not the most user-friendly, in my opinion, with plenty going on everywhere you look, and the occasional ad you can’t dismiss, but you can at least dive deep into your data on a larger screen.

There’s also a smattering of AI analysis available via the companion app. It’s handy if you don’t know much about the individual metrics you’re tracking, but conversely, I feel like it could still be a little more personal and, well, a little less robotic with its assessments. A little bit of charm would go a long way here, like with Google’s Fitbit Air. 

Battery life

• Up to five days of battery life
• Three days of use with AOD on
• Charges in around 90 minutes

The Huawei Watch 6, in my opinion, has strictly middle-of-the-road battery life – not terrible by any means, but also not close to offering the longest life of any wearable right now. 

The latter is actually a bit surprising, as it’s usually Wear OS watches like the Pixel Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 9 that offer a couple of days of battery life, with other wearables like the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro and Xiaomi Smart Band 10 Pro – running custom software as Huawei’s wearable does – sometimes offering weeks of battery life. 

The OnePlus Watch 3, for example, offers five days in Wear OS mode and a whopping 16 days when running its own custom software.

With the Huawei Watch 6, however, I got around five days of mixed use with the always-on screen – when I turned it on, that dropped down to around three days. Use GPS tracking for workouts, especially marathons and other longer forms of exercise, and that number can dwindle even further, though that is par for the course with wearables. 

Now I’m not saying that it’s disappointing – it’s not. I enjoyed the fact that, unlike the Pixel Watch 5 that has donned my wrist recently, I didn’t need to charge it every couple of days. I just feel like it should be considering it isn’t running the same feature-hungry software as the Pixel alternative. 

When it does need a top-up, the magnetic charging puck snaps into place fairly easily, taking around an hour and a half to deliver a full charge – though with the multi-day battery life here, you don’t to fully charge it if it’s running low before you’re headed out the door. 30% should more than suffice for a day, and that only takes 25 minutes. 

Should you buy it?

The Huawei Watch 6 is a stylish, well-built smartwatch with a superbly bright display, a comfortable fit and some of the most extensive health monitoring features around. 

Huawei’s X-Tap system and Health Glance make it impressively quick and easy to gather detailed insights, while the wide range of workout modes and solid multi-day battery life (even if it be better) make it a capable everyday companion.

However, limited third-party app support means it can’t compete with Wear OS or watchOS when it comes to smart functionality, and inconsistencies with sleep tracking take the shine off its fitness credentials. 

It’s not the most well-rounded smartwatch on the market, then, but it remains a compelling option for those who value classic styling, battery life and in-depth health and exercise tracking over apps and better smartphone integration.

To see how it compares, take a look at our selection of the best smartwatches.

We thoroughly test every smartwatch we review. We use industry-standard testing to compare features properly, and we use the watch as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.

• Worn as our main tracker during the testing period
• Data compared to other wearables

	Huawei Watch 6 Review
Manufacturer	Huawei
Screen Size	1.5 inches
IP rating	IP69
Waterproof	5ATM
Size (Dimensions)	46.4 x 10.9 x 46.4 MM
Weight	60 G
Operating System	HarmonyOS 7
Release Date	2026
First Reviewed Date	22/09/2026
Colours	Sky Blue, Sky Black
GPS	Yes
UK RRP	£399
USA RRP	TBC